The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias

Maitraye Das; Brent Hecht; Darren Gergle

doi:10.1145/3290605.3300793

The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias

Maitraye Das, Brent Hecht, Darren Gergle

Communication Studies

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

Millions of people worldwide contribute content to peer production repositories that serve human information needs and provide vital world knowledge to prominent artifcial intelligence systems. Yet, extreme gender participation disparities exist in which men signifcantly outnumber women. A central concern has been that due to self-focus bias [46], these disparities can lead to corresponding gender content disparities, in which content of interest to men is better represented than content of interest to women. This paper investigates the relationship between participation and content disparities in OpenStreetMap. We replicate fndings that women are dramatically under-represented as OSM contributors, and observe that men and women contribute diferent types of content and do so about diferent places. However, the character of these diferences confound simple narratives about self-focus bias: we fnd that on a proportional basis, men produced a higher proportion of contributions in feminized spaces compared to women, while women produced a higher proportion of contributions in masculinized spaces compared to men. We discuss the implications of these complex results for both theory and practice.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450359702
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300793
State	Published - May 2 2019
Event	2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019 - Glasgow, United Kingdom Duration: May 4 2019 → May 9 2019

Publication series

Name	Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference	2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
Country/Territory	United Kingdom
City	Glasgow
Period	5/4/19 → 5/9/19

Funding

This work was supported in part by NSF grants 1815507, 1707296, and 1707319. We would like to thank Dana Choi and Oliver Baldwin for their help in the gender inference procedure. We would also like to thank Isaac Johnson for providing resources on OSM data processing and insightful feedback on the paper.

Keywords

Gender
OpenStreetMap
Peer production
Rural
Self-focus bias
Urban

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Access to Document

10.1145/3290605.3300793

Cite this

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title = "The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias",

abstract = "Millions of people worldwide contribute content to peer production repositories that serve human information needs and provide vital world knowledge to prominent artifcial intelligence systems. Yet, extreme gender participation disparities exist in which men signifcantly outnumber women. A central concern has been that due to self-focus bias [46], these disparities can lead to corresponding gender content disparities, in which content of interest to men is better represented than content of interest to women. This paper investigates the relationship between participation and content disparities in OpenStreetMap. We replicate fndings that women are dramatically under-represented as OSM contributors, and observe that men and women contribute diferent types of content and do so about diferent places. However, the character of these diferences confound simple narratives about self-focus bias: we fnd that on a proportional basis, men produced a higher proportion of contributions in feminized spaces compared to women, while women produced a higher proportion of contributions in masculinized spaces compared to men. We discuss the implications of these complex results for both theory and practice.",

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Das, M, Hecht, B & Gergle, D 2019, The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias. in CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery, 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 5/4/19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300793

The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias. / Das, Maitraye; Hecht, Brent; Gergle, Darren.
CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

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The gendered geography of contributions to OpenStreetMap: Complexities in self-focus bias

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